


Damaged Skin

by Heliosthetroll



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abuse, Blood, Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-02 09:51:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16302899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heliosthetroll/pseuds/Heliosthetroll
Summary: An average day for Dave Strider





	1. Chapter 1

You are Dave and this is bullshit. You are awoken suddenly early in the morning, like seriously the sun is just barely peeking over the horizon what the fuck, to Cal staring at you. You’re laying on your side and he’s lying directly next to you so that his blue eyes can dig directly into your soul. You just barely hold back an all too girlish squeal as you jump out of bed, panting heavily and with sword drawn on instinct. Then you see the note Cal is holding curled up in his arms like a mother would hold a crying child to their chest to comfort them. You know you’re supposed to read it. You know you’re supposed to take it from him. You know you have to. But you really don’t want to. You really really don’t want to. At all. 

But you can’t chicken out. Striders don’t chicken out. And Bro will be pissed if you fail to do whatever that note is telling you to do. And you have a feeling you know what it’s going to tell you to do.

Slowly, oh so very slowly, you reach out for Cal and carefully pull the paper out from between his arms, trying your hardest not to touch him. His eyes almost seem to tear holes in your mind and soul and you swear you can hear high pitched laughter bouncing around faintly in your skull before you grab the note and pull back as fast as you can, turning away from those eyes of his. 

You look down at the now crumpled note. Your panicked and fearful grip must’ve folded it. However, you can still read what it says. ‘Roof. Now.’ Fuck. This early? Is he really wanting to strife already? Sure school is starting late today so you have a while until you’ll have to head out but still. He does know what will happen if you don’t have time to bandage yourself up before school right? Long sleeved shirts and jeans can hide bandages but they aren’t so good at hiding blood stains. 

You don’t have a choice though. You’ve learned that the hard way. Whether you like it or not the only thing to do is listen and go to the roof. So you grab your sword, steel yourself, and head up the stairs to the roof and find Bro waiting for you, Cal somehow over his shoulders as he holds his sword loosely in his grip. You shift your stance nervously, sword held out in front of you as you wait. Just wait for him to move, attack, do anything. But he just stares at you.

Just as you are starting to wonder what’s going on he suddenly charges directly at you. You aren’t at all prepared and he lands a slice directly across your arm as you instinctively bring it up to guard your face. The cut is deep and you grit your teeth at the pain that flares in your body. Drops of blood quickly well up in the wound but you quickly have to ignore it in favor of focusing on your brother. 

He attacks again and again leaving wound after wound across your body both big and small until you are left splayed out on the ground, unable to pick yourself up to continue. He stands over you and his face doesn’t need to move an inch for you to know he’s disappointed in you. He always is. He grabs your sword, probably to go hide it somewhere as punishment, and leaves you there to cook in the Texan heat as the sun rises higher into the sky. You still have about one hour before you have to go to school but you know that if you’re going to be ready you need to get going anyway.

Somehow you manage to peel yourself up off the ground despite the screams of pain every inch of your body sends to your brain to try and make you stop. You get to your feet, wobbling both from exhaustion and probably blood loss too. He never holds back but he was working you extra hard today and you couldn’t keep up at all. You drag yourself to the bathroom, glad he isn’t in there taking one of his long showers, and lock the one door to actually have a lock in your entire apartment as per Bro’s wishes. He likes to be able to get at you no matter where you are or what you’re doing but he likes his privacy when he’s showering. 

Now that you can you look over all your wounds. There’s the large cut on your arm of course and as you brush your hand over it you find that all the blood there is now dry. That’s going to be a bitch to peel off in order to bandage so it can clot properly. It’s about five inches across and it goes diagonally across your arm too so it’s going to take quite a bit of bandage to cover. From what you saw earlier it’s deep as well so it’s going to take a while to heal. Next, you moved further up on your arm and saw a pair of lines going across each other with one large drop of blood hanging from where the wounds met. You winced as you wiped the wet towel over it. Water was the best you had to clean up your wounds with and you just had to pray nothing got in your injuries from the tap water. Next came down from the large wound where you found a smaller cut, this one barely bleeding with just a few small blood drops on it. On your other arm there was a few cuts that weren’t even really bleeding and a larger one where all the blood had pooled together. As you wiped the blood away you watched as a little more leaked out but stayed around the borders of the wound which was good, you wouldn't have to go back over it before bandaging it. You got down to your legs after that and mostly those were just scraped but there were a few small cuts here and there as well. 

With inventory on your pained body taken all that was left was peeling off the dried blood, which sure enough hurt more than the original cut even had, and bandaging up your wounds. It took about forty-five minutes to get through everything but finally you finished and managed to throw on some clothes before having to leave in order to catch your bus on time. No breakfast for you it seemed not that there was ever anything in the apartment to eat ever but whatever. You hadn’t been able to shower either but a little deodorant hid most of the stink so that could wait until you got home again. Now all that mattered was getting through another day of school while your body screamed at you. So just like every other day.


	2. A Savior

Once you arrive at school you go into cool guy mode. Aka keep your head down, stay silent, stay stoic, and pray no idiot kids try to talk to you. Talking to people meant risking them touching you which meant risking them finding out about your injuries and talking in of itself meant rambling in your case with ran the risk of you giving everything away on accident. You couldn’t let that happen. So you laid low and let everyone at school think of you as that one loner kid who never speaks or shows any emotion and has no friends whatsoever but dresses like a hotshot cool kid complete with shades that even teachers don’t bother you about anymore. They’ve all long learned that nothing is going to make you take them off, even going to the principal or getting failed. You know Bro doesn’t give a shit about that stuff as long as he doesn’t have to deal with it so you don’t give a shit either. 

All that matters is getting through each day with as little attention drawn to you as possible and then going home to deal with Bro some more before the cycle continues. 

This day, however, seems determined to throw you a curveball at every fucking turn. 

It starts when your classmate gets mad at you during first period.

It had started out simple enough. You were a bit groggy during class, and who could really blame you after having to get up so early after minimal sleep due to the nightmares that always wanted you, and because of this, you were slacking off on the group project you had been assigned to do that day.

“Hey asshole! Why don’t you actually try to fucking help us out here fuckass!” You blinked a couple times before coming back into focus. “Huh? Oh yeah. The project. What are we doing again?” The male classmate groans and now that you’re focused on him you recognize him. Karkat Vantas aka the kid everyone knows because he never stops yelling. That and the kid has all the friends. All of them. “We’re supposed to be going over the symbolism in the chapter dumbass!” For pretty much any other kid he’d be getting in trouble for how much he swears and how loud he is but most if not all of the teachers have pretty much given up on getting Karkat to stop swearing or yelling. He just doesn’t care. That and he legit seems to have zero control over his volume. “Oh right that. Yeah I didn’t read the chapter so…” You shrug at him and the kid actually legit growls at you. It’s actually kinda cute considering how small, fluffy, and generally unthreatening the kid is. It’s like a puppy attacking your hand with partially grown in teeth. It's much cuter than it could ever be painful.

“Great! Of course, I get paired with you of all people. The kid who didn’t do the fucking homework!” He’s gesturing wildly like he thinks that slapping the air will make you suddenly have read the stupid book that you could give less shits about. Hell, you don’t even know the title of the damn thing. Doesn’t matter to you. English can suck your dick.

Halfway through his rant that you’ve partially started to drift off in the middle of his hand hits your arm without him intending it. Your injured arm. The one with the large cut on it. You wince as a sharp pain shoots up your arm before you can stop yourself and Karkat stops as well, having noticed the brief way too pained for just a gentle brush expression on your face. Damn even with your clothes and the bandage that little brush still hurt. Maybe not as much as touching it without those things in the way, that would’ve hurt like hell, but enough to make you flinch since you weren’t expecting to be touched and you weren’t expecting that level of pain either.

He stares at where he touched you for a few moments before looking up at your face and then down at your arm again. You need to get out of there. Now. Your arm, the one not currently be stared at like an ice cream cone on a hot Texan day, shoots into the air and the teacher comes over. You quickly ask to use the bathroom and barely wait for permission before shooting out of there. You hope that just gets interpreted as you eating some bad tacos yesterday or something.

You flee to the nearest male bathroom and stick yourself in a stall to try and calm down. That quickly becomes way too claustrophobic though and you scramble to let yourself back out. You go over to the mirror and the sink and grip the porcelain hard. You’re shaking a bit and you try desperately to calm down. Take deep breaths. It’s chill. He doesn’t know why you’re hurt. It’s not like he can see through the bandage to your cut. No need to have a panic attack traitorous body. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. 

You nearly shit yourself when you hear the bathroom door open and your head whips to the sound as you body instinctively drops to a battle ready position like Bro taught you to. But instead of being met with a blank expression and pointy anime shades you see something even more unexpected. Karkat without a scowl. He looks concerned, raising his hands up in silent surrender to you as he sees your reaction to his entrance. 

“Shit.” That’s all that comes to your head and as a consequence for once you don’t have some long-winded metaphor to distract yourself and others with, to confuse them and toss them off your scent. You don’t entirely know why but you’re terrified of this moment and of Karkat seeing you like this. You chalk it up to nerves mixed with the unfamiliarity of this situation. At least with Bro you knew what to expect. Things were normal there with him. Always the same. The status quo never changed. And you were more than fine with that. But this is new. And it terrifies the fuck out of you. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Why’d you flinch like that back there? What’s going on?” He’s still yelling of course but somehow it doesn’t feel like he’s angry at you. Instead it feels like the pinnacle of concern. “I- Fuck.” You can’t get anything straight in your head it’s just a jumbled screaming mess of thoughts that are overwhelming your senses and filling you with more panic and fear then anyone should be able to handle without combusting and now they’re all tumbling out without your consent. “I’m fine it’s just a little cut he didn’t mean to make it so deep and now I’m panicking like a fucking idiot because I can’t keep a grip on my emotions like a dumbass and Bro is gonna be so pissed for this and you gotta promise me you won’t tell anyone or do anything this is worse than shitting your pants like damn kid you a baby or what you need a diaper cause I sure feel like I should be wearing a diaper with how much of a baby I’m being over this I shouldn’t be panicking like this I’m a Strider I’m not supposed to be scared and I’m not supposed to flinch and you aren’t supposed to know I’m hurt and god now I’m just flapping my yap to no end and I probably sound insane and you’re going to tell the entire school about how crazy again I can say goodbye to my cool kid cred from now on I’m just that one crazy kid who went on a ten minute ramble in the bathroom after running off to have a panic attack for no fucking reason and I really need to shut up now but I can’t and-” You thank your lucky stars if those even exist that Karkat chooses this moment to shut you up by grabbing your arm and pulling down your sleeve. You let out a half surprised half pained sound and he looks to you with an apologetic and concerned look all over his face that just makes you feel even worse about this entire situation. 

“What the hell is this?” He gestures to the bandage covering most of your forearm. “Nothing.” You say quickly on instinct and he gives you an unamused deadpan expression before glancing around. You’re confused by this but you guess he’s doing it on instinct to check if anyone’s around? You guess that makes sense in a private situation like this considering how many friends he supposedly has. It’s actually kinda heartwarming that he wants to make sure that whatever your about to tell him stays between the two of you if that’s how you want it to be, which it is. 

“Fuck no something like that isn’t just nothing. What happened?” You can’t tell him. You’ll get in so much trouble if you do. But even through his swearing, angry tone, and yelling, you can tell that he cares about you and your injury. He’s the first person to care about you. Ever.

It’s overwhelming.

“I…” This is it. You’re finally going to tell someone about Bro. Here goes nothing. 

“It’s from Bro. My brother. We strife. He sliced me a bit too deep with his sword.”

Karkat gets this horrified and intensely worried look on his face and you flinch. Damn it no one was supposed to know about this and you sure as hell don’t need some random kid’s pity because you failed to strife right. This was your burden not anyone else’s and you weren’t some charity case. You were a grown fucking kid who could handle getting cut up and taking hits from your brother if it meant getting better and stronger. 

“Holy fuck.” Karkat finally seems to get enough control over his mind to say and for once he isn’t shouting. In fact it’s a near whisper when he says it. “You strife with your brother?! With something that can cut you?!” “Swords.” Your response is automatic and you wince at the way it makes his worry even more intense. “What the actual shitstainig fuck?! He makes you strife him with fucking swords and makes cuts as deep as that one?!” You shrug, finally pulling your arm back uncomfortable and really just wanting to be left alone. “It’s fine. I can take it.” “You shouldn’t have to! That’s such a shitty thing to do to someone!” You shrug and try to get out of the bathroom, all of this was too much and you needed to be alone. Badly. 

But Karkat grabs you again, this time by the wrist as to avoid hurting you and he speaks again. “Dave you shouldn’t go back there. You should go to a friend’s house and tell them about this, call the cops, you shouldn’t have to put up with an abusive brother like that.” You shrug again and try to pull away but he’s got a stronger grip on you now. “Dave come on please.” His voice actually sounds desperate if only a little bit and the look in his screams friendly concern. Somehow you just can’t resist it so you give in. 

“Fine. I’ll come over to your place for a night. But I’m not calling cops and you can’t tell anyone.” He looks sad that you aren’t going to be going along with everything he said but he nods regardless and after an exchange of contact information and addresses you head back to class.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter two done upon request! Might do a third chapter too might just leave it here.


End file.
